


All things swept sole away

by middlemarch



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, Marriage, Regret, mother-in-law, the path not taken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 02:19:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8603413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It wasn't disappointment she felt.





	

Sometimes, Hermione wondered what it would have been like if the most formative years of her life had not been spent in a battle against an annihilating (and yet intermittently very petty) evil. Snape’s book, with all his spells—could she have written something like that if she hadn’t been waffling between terror and the wonderful abandon that came with research? Was there someone she’d have been friends with besides the boys, some strong Hufflepuff girl or a coterie of Ravenclaws, who would have rejoiced in her success and shared books and sweets enough that she wouldn’t have felt the need to spend a fortune in Galleons on Sleekeazy and twee blue chiffon for Viktor, who hardly knew what to do with his hands off the Quidditch pitch and had never grasped DeCourcey’s theorem, thus forever removed from her true respect? Would she have had to stomach Molly Weasley’s heavy pastry? Could she still have been granted the Time-Turner, like every other first witch of her year, for a journey of discovery, an apprenticeship at Avalon or ever-sunny Crete, to become a Domina before she’d even graduated, as McGonagall was and Sprout, who was always underestimated… She might have gone to Egypt for further training or Bhutan, and brought home rugs that hypnotized, a familiar who got along with Crookshanks, a cool, shining asp named Heka that curled along her arm and nape, who slept in her bed, nestled in her hair. She could have met Ikal at the temple that drifted between the two worlds like smoke and not across a negotiating table, or Gilles in the twilit French Quarter, trying to appreciate the jazz as much as the beignets he plied her with, instead of at a dull party in dull robes with the Weird Sisters cover band mangling Yellow Submarine (though the substitution of “saccharine” had made her laugh so sharply she didn’t mind the cheap champagne they’d magicked pink). She entertained these thoughts when she was nursing Hugo in the solidly un-magical rocking chair she’d found on a London jaunt or when Ron forgot she was due in Nantes for the annual conference on Muggle relations; she didn’t confide in her husband because it wasn’t her way and the thoughts would have been received as rejection when they weren’t meant to be, only a sort of grief for the child she’d been and the woman she’d never become. Neville knew, she saw it when they had tea in his rooms after letting Rose run headlong to the brick wall, Neville who’d been understudy to a prophecy and now was drafted to be a Head of House, the wrong house of course, but he’d grown up accustomed to fractures and loss. He was the only who sent an owl on her mum’s birthday and she counted herself lucky for his tenacious friendship, as she was for Ron’s steady love with his occasional brilliant gambit and her darling, distracting children, Molly’s clockwork design journal pointedly left at beside Hermione’s egg-cup, the kiss Harry placed on her forehead, where the third Eye was, every midnight at Samhain, without fail.

**Author's Note:**

> This idea occurred to me and I had a lovely time imagining my own elaborations on wizard/witch training and scholarship and how much Hermione would have appreciated them. This is almost but not quite a midlife crisis sort of fic, but I think Hermione and Neville would be the more introspective ones, to reflect on how they'd ended up where they were, more so than Harry and Ron. And I wanted to give a little more time and attention to the powerful witches of HP.
> 
> Heka means magic in Egyptian. The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
